Porting from Win16 to Win32 (VB1~3 -> VB4~6) is mostly straightforward - all you need is to:

- Have installed at least two different versions of the same obsolete product, because later VB versions can't open forms saved in earlier versions UNLESS you use the earlier version to save forms as text+binary, instead of a monolithic binary blob because pretty much every binary format circa 1993 was actually "a raw memory dump of whatever internal structures were used in that exact version" in disguise (same story as Office formats, really)

- Source replacement OCX (ActiveX) controls for whatever weird custom VBX your original sources were using. Sometimes it's as easy as "get rid of the offending VBX because 3D look is native to Win32", and sometimes is as hard as "proprietary blob, original developer got bought, then merged, then double bankrupted, and now sells real estate in Michigan". If your program was a good citizen and stuck with whatever VBXs shipped on VB3 Pro, you're golden... as long as you have your VB/VS6 CDs handy (or know well your $SEARCHENGINE-fu)

- Upgrade your external API declarations. Most of them are just matter of renaming libraries ("kernel" -> "kernel32", "user" -> "user32", "gdi" -> "gdi32", and so on - luckily API names and parameters remain mostly unchanged, aside of Integer->Long promotions that you must be well aware of), but there are plenty of 16-bit only cruft that got thrown under the 32-bit bus (hello, GetWinFlags!) so you must figure how to cope with loss.

But that got NOTHING on the dreaded "Old World VB" -> .NET switch - you're supposed to take a decade of code or so, incinerate it, and start over! That's pretty much the main reason of why I left Visual Basic behind, why projects like GenRomSuite died, etc.

You can do it yourself at home, you know~
You only need to be extremely bored. Oh, and knowing some Visual Basic helps.

So far, I've tried with the following random pieces of VB3 shareware:

- Cubix v1.0 (Scandere Software, puzzle): This is something that we would call today an "crowdfunding pitch", as there is nothing to unlock, just a bunch of unfinished code and the promise that "the more people pay, the faster we can finish the game". Does not use external controls at all.

- Four Seasons v1.06 (Randy Rasa, cards): This one even has sounds! Oh, and the regcode is hardcoded inside the application code - how nice of him~. The decompiler barfed its guts during the late stage of decompiling, but I was able to pick up the bits and build a working executable. Uses PicClip and Sheridan's THREED controls.

- KASINO KENO 2 v?? (Dennis Pipes, lottery): Meh, I don't understand Keno. No regcode, all you need to unlock the "Due System" (whatever that means)) menu is to just click the "Games Played" label - that's all. Does not use external controls at all.

- Lottsa Lotto Picks! v?? (Stephen F. Nannini, lottery): Man, why all those lottery simulators for dumb people that has more money than common sense!? But if you just paid $12+$2 for shipping, you wouldn't even have needed the decompiler anyway! Nothing to unlock, but try typing "ZAXXIN" while you hould CTRL+ALT on either the main window or the about dialog. Does not use external controls at all.

- AHORSEX v1.0 (Juan Carlos Torres Navarro, wordgame): Yay, an H-game with love... from Spain?! Well, you get real pictures of tits (scanned, not drawn!)... and an lameass Hangman game. All this at a rather heavy 2MB executable (and that's for the original VB3 build!), which was certainly a luxury back in the 14400bps BBSes, and the game ships with no documentation, timebombs or anything, but it does look like it has some hidden function to load your own words from external files. Does not use external controls at all.

But those were straight-up decompiling jobs. For extra fun, I tested my luck with some random non-game stuff, and found a stupidass caller ID tracker application (kinda useless in the post-modem era) which came with some kinda overengineered license key validation routines. So overengineered that they're actually BROKEN and will cause the application to hang on an infinite loop if started up with the default placeholder shareware key, "Unregistered Demo Version", as the routines expect to only validate all-caps and numbers. Seven forms: a nagscreen, four dialogs which tell you how wonderful life would be if you order your own 25-character license key for yourself, an about dialog, and the actual application window itself (which contains more broken code for configuring your modem). I guess B***d B***n and Company should be working now for Microsoft Product Activation :DLicensed Pirate® since 2006, 100% Buttcoin™-free

So yeah, while you 'muricans bitch and moan about Trump being Trump, our very own Donkey-at-Chief just broke half the Internet.

Also, that's what you get when people decide that centralizing everything behind the "sekuritah" excuse is an awesome idea.

UPDATE: Only the services/hosts under 104.26.0.0/20 seem to be actively blocked right now (wondering which opposition-led website pissed off the druglord regime enough to disconnect an entire /20). Other ranges work as usual, their 1.1.1.1 spyware DNS is also reachable from here.

UPDATE 2: Managed to check from a working CANTV DSL link: 104.26.0.0/20 is reachable and affected sites DO work fine. Apparently it's only Movilnet that its blocking this part of Cloudflare, maybe due to a broken router somewhere in the Caracas HQ. Sites I can't visit anymore:

- Danbooru
- HDD Guru forums
- GBATemp

...so basically, there goes the three sites I most use daily :/Licensed Pirate® since 2006, 100% Buttcoin™-free

Good ol' Raymond Chen talks about Windows update formats:
- Full updates
- Delta updates (which aren't actually "delta" patches!)
- Express updates
- Quality updates (the ones introduced during Windows 7 late lifecycle, and which looks surprisingly similar to BPS patches, since these updates can also use the source file as patch data - wonder what encoding they're using under the hood)

But as coins have two sides, at the other side, the IDE hasn't been supported since April '08, and even back then it has already been abandoned since New Coke .NET happened, six years earlier. But that hasn't stopped people from doing stupid things devising compatibility workarounds on every Windows version released since then.

Relevant read: this guy wrote a book about doing stupid things with VB while working for Microsoft, became crazy during the process, burned all bridges before New Coke .NET, then moved to greener pastures, but every now and then he feels the temptation of the devil to go back and toy with Visual Basic .NOT. Oh, and his book is on the MSDN CDs that shipped with your copy of VB6, if you don't want to "spend $300 on eBay for a hardcopy".Licensed Pirate® since 2006, 100% Buttcoin™-free